“Aren’t you curious,” he asked, watching his mother’s face, “as to which of your guests I consider guilty?”
“No!” she cried, her hands balled into fists, her gloves bunching. “No!”
Darkefell’s brows knit together, and he stared down at his mother.
Her eyes glittered oddly in the candlelight, and Anne’s stomach twisted. Had they got it wrong? Why was the marchioness so distressed?
Mr. Grover stood and approached Lady Darkefell, grabbing her arm and supporting her while he glared at the marquess. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he bellowed, shaking so much that his old-fashioned wig skewed even more sideways. “Ashamed, I say. To bring us all here and to bring in that… that son of Canaan,” he said with a furious gesture toward Osei still sitting by the fire. “It’s disgusting! If that trollop, Cecilia, had not consorted with him, she wouldn’t have died. Shameful strumpet got what she deserved!”
Lady Darkefell pointedly removed her arm from his grasp and said, so quietly Anne had to strain to hear, “Hiram, that’s enough.”
“No, Sophie, I’ll not let you be shamed by your son. A whoremonger, lying with barmaids and town girls like Tilly Landers and Miss Allengate… he may do as he likes, but I’ll not have him slander his neighbors by accusing one of murder.”
“How interesting, Mr. Grover,” Darkefell said in steely tones, “that you so strenuously revile Mr. Boatin’s presence here, and yet he is silent upon the subject of your presence, which he has had to suffer innumerable times over the last few years.”
“You compare us, sir?” the gentleman roared. “You dare compare me to that… slave of slaves?” Grover dropped back down into a chair and passed one shaking hand over his bulging eyes.
“See here, Darkefell,” the magistrate said, eyeing Grover uneasily but then turning his attention fully to the marquess. “Am I to understand that you believe someone in this room to be guilty of the murder of Cecilia Wainwright? William Spottiswode is not guilty?”
Darkefell cast him a look of patient derision as he said, “Ah, Sir Trevor, you’ve finally joined the rest in catching what I said and what I meant… both the same thing, I assure you. Someone in this room foully murdered Cecilia—I do not see Spottiswode in this room.”
The magistrate turned red, so that made three people in the room suffused with the color. It was increasingly difficult to watch all that was occurring, but when Anne again looked at Lydia, her gaze was riveted, for her friend was rising, pulling herself from her husband’s grasp. She dashed across the room and threw herself at her brother-in-law.
“He didn’t mean to do it! I’m sure of that,” she cried.
“What on earth…?” Darkefell grunted, set off balance; he cast a look of appeal to his younger brother. “John, come get your wife! Unhand me, my lady!”
“Nooooo,” she keened, clinging to him, her knuckles white as her fists bunched in the fine fabric of his jacket sleeves. “John didn’t mean to kill Cecilia. You cannot prove it!”
Anne watched in horror, dizzy with doubt. Did Lydia know something they had not considered? But Lord John appeared mystified and horror-struck in a way that left no doubt—in her, at least—as to his innocence.
“My God,” Lady Sophie cried, both trembling hands up to her forehead, “John, I said you would regret marrying that foolish featherbrain!”
Weeping, Lydia whirled away from the marquess and glared at her mother-in-law. “You’ve always hated me,” she sobbed. “You tried to turn John away from me and succeeded.”
John made it across the space in three steps and took Lydia into his arms. “My love, don’t be silly! Mother could not turn me away from you.”
The babble in the room, consisting of confused murmuring and questions circulating from person to person, grew. Sure as she was of John’s innocence of the worst suspicions, Anne spared a moment to shake her head at Lydia’s absurdity. The girl was truly shatterbrained, but at least her husband was gentle with her, taking her into his arms and murmuring to her as she wept against his chest. Anne glanced over at the marquess, to see that he was going red-faced himself, now. Four red-faced folks. To forestall further speculation, she stepped into a pool of lamplight and said, “Calm, everyone, please! Despite my friend’s fears, her husband is not the culprit Lord Darkefell spoke of just now. Please listen to the marquess.”
“Thank you, Lady Anne. John, perhaps you should take Lydia to her room,” he said, raising his voice over her sobs.
“No, we’ll stay, Tony,” the younger brother said grimly, his arms still around his wife, her head against his shoulder. “We’ll stay if just to see in what folly you’re engaged. I thought I was the foolish son, Mother, but perhaps Tony has decided to usurp my position.”
“Very good, John!” Darkefell said with a flash of a grin. “Congratulations on the best sally I have heard from you in many a year.”
Lord John fell silent, his cheeks burning with a crimson stain at his brother’s teasing. Anne was beginning to suspect the red-faced malady was infectious, from the number who now sported scarlet flags on their cheeks. She was pleased to see that the marquess was regaining his normal color, so perhaps the infection spread quickly but was as soon defeated.
Darkefell exchanged a brief glance with Anne, and she nodded once; he scanned his audience. “I cannot tell you the entire story, I’m afraid, but several things have united to give me confidence that I now know the culprit of at least that one terrible crime, Cecilia Wainwright’s murder. She was guilty of ambition beyond her status in life, but who can blame her? She was with child when her life was cut short; that much is commonly known,” he said over a few gasps. “But much speculation has been bandied about. My secretary’s name has been posited as the hopeful father.”
“Disgusting,” Grover grunted, his arms crossed over his paunch. “The taint of that unnatural union is what got her killed, for what is the fellow but a savage, a beast plucked from that sinister continent for the purpose of servitude, his natural state since Ham first dared make a jest of his revered father, Noah!”
Anne longed to answer as Osei, speechless and ashen, could not, for Grover’s twisting of the mythic biblical curse of Canaan revealed him to be a sophist of the most degraded and dangerous type, willing to misuse Bible verses to justify any kind of foul behavior.
But the marquess was prepared. “Grover, you’ve revealed yourself to be a biblical hypocrite, for doesn’t that Book also tell us not to bear false witness? Your implied accusation against Osei is a sham.”
“Do not use the good Book against me, you fornicator,” Grover said, rising with difficulty from his chair. “You, who bedded that bar wench, Tilly Landers, and likely killed her, too?”
“Be careful, Grover,” the marquess said through gritted teeth. “You tread on dangerous territory.”
“Sophie, despite the friendship I bear you, I will not stay to be insulted by your son. He is not fit to wash my feet nor those of my son.”
“Your son, your only son, the same one who will no longer speak to you, Grover?” Darkefell said, his tone deadly soft. “The son who has severed ties with you, despite your lies to the contrary?” he went on, his tone rising. “Theo wrote to me, you know, to apologize for your wickedness, and told me he no longer considers you his father. Perhaps he suspects something we should know about? Something besides your willingness to kill innocent Africans on their terrible voyage to slavery in Jamaica?”
“You… you have never proved I had anything to do with that!” Grover said, jabbing his finger in Darkefell’s direction.
“No, perhaps I cannot tie you to it by a specific order given, but if I had not come forward with what Julius and I witnessed, you would have recovered for damages from lost slaves, slaves that your crew tossed overboard. You knew about that, for I told you myself. Yet you tried to recover their monetary value from your insurer for accidental death, even knowing your case was a lie from start to finish. Your crew performed actions that any civi
lized nation—and I do not count our country among those civilized nations, not when we can wink and turn our face away from this—would call murder!”
Grover began toward the doorway, pushing past horrified guests.
But John leaped in front of him and grabbed him by the shoulders, saying, “Do you want him to stay, Tony?”
“Yes, Brother. I have one more crime to lay at his door, one that both his biblical studies and the law of this land do condemn, the murder of Cecilia Wainwright.”
Lady Sophie gasped and put one trembling hand over her mouth.
“What proof do you have of this infamous accusation, my lord?” Sir Trevor shouted.
“Sit down, all of you, and I’ll tell you,” Darkefell said. But the crowd could not so easily settle, though they gathered in tightly around the chair in which John had forced Grover to sit. “Lady Anne, will you join me?” he asked, putting out his hand.
She advanced and took his hand, which he used to pull her close and tuck her arm in his.
“This lady,” he said, covering her hand on his arm with his free hand, “was the inspiration for every bit of evidence I discovered—”
She cleared her throat.
“That, uh, we discovered, and she reasoned out, with me, the sequence of events.”
Mr. Grover tried to rise, but Lord John put one hand on his shoulder, saying, “Do get on with it, Tony, if you have proof. Grover seems restless.”
“Sophie,” Grover said, staring up at the marchioness with beseechment in his goggling eyes, “stop your sons, please, for they’re tormenting an old man.”
She mutely shook her head, but there was confusion and fear over her face. “Tony, do you have proof that he had anything to do with Cecilia’s death?”
Anne met the marquess’s gaze. Because of their tiff on the stairs, she hadn’t told him of the confirmation she had received from Robbie about Cecilia sending a note to Hiram Grover on the very day she was murdered, a note Anne suspected asked him to meet Cecilia, to accede to her blackmail. They had earlier deduced that Cecilia figured out Grover was responsible for the slaughtered sheep, a crime for which Jamey was afraid he would be blamed because of his use of the wolf costume. Nor had Anne had time to tell him of her speaking with Ellen and her confirmation of their theory of what happened to her.
She leaned close to his ear and murmured to him briefly all she had learned. He squeezed her arm in exultation, and Anne stared up at him, distracted by just how dangerously attractive she found him in that moment, handsome, as always, but triumphantly doing what was right.
He turned to his mother and said, “Yes, madam, I do have proof.”
“He’s lying, Sophie,” Grover cried. “You, above all people, should know my measure.” He stared at the marchioness with an unwavering gaze, and there was something in his eyes that Anne thought was different than the appeal one might expect; it almost seemed a threatening expression, but the woman shrugged and shook her head. It was an odd little exchange, and Anne stored it in her memory to mull over later.
Tony turned toward the door and said loudly, “Sanderson, bring them in!”
Anne’s burly groom pulled in, by the scruff of their necks, William Spottiswode and Jamey. Some of the ladies fell back and gasped, while the men turned angry stares toward the marquess.
“What do you mean by subjecting our wives to the foul presence of this… this monster?” Benjamin Jenkins asked, flinging one hand out toward Spottiswode.
“Darkefell, you have gone too far,” Pomfroy blustered. “How can you justify stealing a prisoner away from my cells? Who authorized such a thing?”
“No one. But if you listen, you’ll agree that I have, indeed, brought a murderer into the midst of this gathering, by inviting Hiram Grover.”
Several voices began speaking at once, clamoring, asking questions, demanding answers. The marquess put up his hand as Grover, pale now, sweated in his chair, John’s heavy hands still on his shoulder.
“Let’s leave, Jenkins—I want to go home,” Mrs. Lily Jenkins said, her voice clear but trembling.
“Go if you wish, Jenkins,” the marquess said. “But remember what you have heard from Mr. Allengate of your wife’s dealings with Mrs. Holderness and how she’s responsible for an innocent woman, Bess Parker, being held on a charge of theft. Mrs. Jenkins broke into that woman’s home and planted the only evidence of her supposed thievery, just because you happened to speak with Mrs. Parker one day on the street, and someone told her about it.”
The marquess paused, then with a quick glance at Richard Allengate, said in a softer tone, “And then ask her about Fanny Allengate and the girl’s diary, which she purloined from Allengate’s home and filled with poisonous lies about that inoffensive young lady’s supposed ‘affair’ with me. During a bereavement visit after Miss Allengate’s tragic death, she returned the tainted journal to its hiding spot. I invited you both here tonight because I wished Miss Fanny Allengate publicly vindicated.” He swept his gaze over everyone gathered. “She and I were not involved in any illicit affair, nor did we meet secretly. She was innocent in every sense of the word. Mrs. Lily Jenkins is a young lady who will stop at nothing where she fears her husband’s emotions engaged. She was jealous of Miss Allengate, and she was jealous of Bess Parker.”
Lily Jenkins shrank next to her husband. “Lies, Benjamin, all lies.”
Darkefell said, his voice hard with anger but his manner restrained, “Not lies, madam, the truth. You fail to recognize it, perhaps, because you abuse it, and so it is no friend of yours.”
“I’m the one who told Lily Jenkins about Fanny’s admiration of you, my lord,” Miss Beatrice Lange spoke up, staring at him. “I n-never thought she’d use it so… never suspected…” She trailed off and covered her face with both her hands. The vicar’s wife rushed to her side and held her.
“Miss Lange,” the marquess said gently, “even if you had not told her such a thing, she would have figured it out or found something else to use against Miss Allengate, so vicious was her jealousy. But enough about Mrs. Lily Jenkins’s sordid behavior. It bears repeating only that Miss Allengate and I had no affair. She was an innocent maiden, who merely indulged in the kind of daydreams in which girls will apparently indulge.”
He cast a wicked glance at Anne, and she coolly returned the look. He would not make her blush, she was determined.
He then swept his gaze around the company. “Tonight’s gathering would serve several purposes, I thought, but the most important is still extant—the guilt of Hiram Grover in the murder of Cecilia Wainwright.” He turned and summoned Jamey to him. Sanderson, for the time being, stayed a respectful distance away with Spottiswode still in his powerful clutches. “Jamey,” the marquess said as the young man approached him, “did I not catch you and one of the other stable lads frightening serving girls with a hideous wolf costume?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
His youthful good looks appeared jaded and coarse by candlelight, Anne thought.
“It was an elaborate charade, indeed, for the costume was more than just a pelt—it had a full mask made of papier maché. I know, since I was wearing it when it was incinerated,” he said with a sideways grin at Anne. “And where did you say you got the costume?”
“Told you we made it, milord.”
“And that was a lie, was it not?” The groom nodded, and Darkefell went on: “And where did you really get it, as you finally told me just yesterday?”
“From Mr. Grover, milord.”
“Mr. Grover, for whom you worked before my farm tenant, Dandy Lincoln, hired you? Mr. Grover, who paid you to leave his employ and wheedle your way into mine as a spy and informer?”
The stablehand nodded.
The marquess turned to Hiram Grover. “I do wonder, sir, where you got such a costume?”
“If that costume came from my home,” he said with an attempt at nonchalance, “then it is an old one from when my son and you and your brothers engaged in amateur the
atrics.”
“The wolf from Perrault’s Red Riding Hood,” Lady Darkefell gasped. She turned to her son. “Tony, do you not remember? The wolf costume that Mrs. Grover made.”
“I do remember, now that you speak of it,” he said.
“Then that farmhand stole it from me!” Grover thundered, pointing at Jamey.
“No, I din’t!” Jamey hollered. “Squire Grover give it t’me an’ tolt me t’be seen a’wearin’ it couple’times.”
“But why?” Darkefell said, stabbing his finger at Grover. “Why pass it to onto your former stablehand?”
Grover remained silent and turned his face away, assuming, from what Anne could see of his fleshy countenance, an expression of dignified loathing and distaste.
“I’ll tell you why,” Darkefell said, glancing around the room. “He has waged an insidious war against my family, and more specifically, myself and Mr. Boatin, in his anger over my stopping his nefarious scheme to collect insurance money to which he was not entitled.”
“Lies,” Grover bellowed.
“Not lies! The truth, and well you know it,” Anne said, her voice cold.
“Ridiculous to imply that I would willfully attack a friend in such a base way,” Grover said into space. “For how could I harm him without harming his mother?”
The marchioness stared at him, her eyes wide with terror.
Darkefell went on, “The fact that you did not have the wolf costume in your possession does explain, though, why a tuft of fur found by Cecilia’s Wainwright’s murdered body was not from the wolf costume but from another fur, a robe found in the cave by Staungill Force.”
“That proves I had nothing to do with it!” Grover cried. “I have never been up to those falls.”
“It doesn’t prove any such thing, even if we believe you,” Anne said. “Just because the fur robe was found up at the falls does not mean it was there when the piece was cut from it, does it? It is a movable object. You cut the tuft but then discarded the fur robe, as you did not want it associated with you or your house. Unfortunately, some poor wretch—Neddy Carter, perhaps—found it and carted it up to the cave to use for warmth.”
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